"Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising every time we fall."

— Confucius

Albert Einstein never spoke until he was 4 years old — and didn't read a word for another three years. One teacher pronounced him "mentally slow, unsociable and adrift in foolish dreams."

Walt Disney got canned from his newspaper gig by an editor who insisted "he lacked imagination and had no good ideas."

You can't help but root for guys like that who don't quit. Guys like Mark King.

School peers insisted the slight white guy on the wrong side of 6-foot-tall — who never even played high-school basketball — was nuts if he thought he would ever play in the National Basketball Association.

Unfortunately, the closest King has come to NBA hardwood are the floor seats he occasionally receives as freebies to an Orlando Magic game.

His dad couldn't afford a backboard but tacked a hoop on a garage wall. King shot relentlessly — even shoveling snow from the driveway to clear a path to the basket and his dream: following in his heroes' footsteps. A dream King wasn't shy about sharing.

Once in high school, a student, baiting him, invited King to share his dream with the class.

"I want to play in the NBA," he said, matter-of-factly.

The howling was deafening.

Getting cut five times from his junior- and senior-high basketball teams didn't help King's case.

He graduated in 1995 and moved to Kentucky. While playing a pickup game, he was encouraged to try out at Pikeville College.

By that time, King had thought about hanging up his high-tops. But those thoughts were crowded out one day when Psalm 37:4 randomly crossed his mind:

Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart.

To King, everything now made sense: God could use his passion for good. And what better place to resurrect his dream than in Kentucky, where college basketball is almost religion.

King enrolled at Pikeville, too late for tryouts. But the coach invited him to conditioning drills with the team.

Every day, King worked himself sick.

Finally, the junior-varsity coach handed him a playbook.

"It was like this amazing accomplishment," King says. "One of those moments you go, ‘wow.'"

There were few amazing moments after that. The highlight of his college career: logging three minutes of mop-up duty in a blowout game, hoisting an air ball and scoring a layup.

Through college ball flamed out, King's passion for basketball still burned.

He turned his attention to other professional leagues.

In 2003, he tried out for the Great Lakes Storm of the Continental Basketball Association. Cut.

After moving to Orlando in 2005, he joined the Orlando Aces, a team in the American Basketball Association, as a player-executive. That planted a seed. Perhaps he could start his own team someday.

That would have to wait. King heard that a CBA team was starting up in his old college stomping grounds near Pikeville. He wasted no time contacting the coach.

King's hoop skills weren't good enough to make the active roster, but the coach kept him around for his business skills. Undaunted, King continued working out, shooting 500 three-pointers a day, keeping in shape.

It paid off. Near the end of the inaugural season in 2008, King was handed an East Kentucky Miners jersey. In his first action, the Miners scored 194 points — the most points by a CBA team. King tacked on five points — including a sweet three-pointer.

"The most joyous thing for me was having people come up and say they were inspired," King says.

By this time, King was kicking around the notion of owning his own team. He lined up an investor and brokered a deal to launch an Orlando franchise with the World Basketball Association Exposure League, a professional developmental league that has launched the careers of NBA players such as Jamario Moon of the Cleveland Cavaliers.

This May, the Florida Flight will take off, though he's still finalizing a venue.

"Mark is an extremely hard worker and has a strong passion for basketball," league commissioner Lionel Garrett said. "I felt this would be a good opportunity to get his team off the ground."

Thomas Edison made 1,000 failed attempts to perfect the light bulb. Asked once by a reporter to describe that feeling, Edison replied: "I didn't fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps."

King — who says he may suit up again with the Flight — gets that.

"Most people don't have the faith to try," he says. "They get sucked into what the world says should be. Did I make the NBA? No. But here's the deal: Dreams are the road map that God uses to get us where we're supposed to be."